A growing theme in education is the notion that assessment is a tool for advancing learning, not only a tool for measuring what students have already learned. 

Teachers have made informal use of formative assessments for years, but now many districts want to take a more formal approach to monitoring students' progress during the year so that teachers can modify instruction for individual needs and give students feedback to help meet learning goals.

Before adopting a formative assessment system, districts must make many preliminary decisions. One of the key questions is to ask who will be using information from formative assessments---will it be used by administrators, teachers or both? What infrastructure and competencies (e.g. ability to analyze student work and design effective instructional improvement strategies) do the schools have? What investments will be needed in infrastructure and in building staffing competences before a formative assessment process can be implemented?

Teachers often complain that preparing students for statewide assessments takes away from instruction time. Classroom-based performance assessments can bridge the gap between learning and the reporting and accountability functions of statewide tests.  New York State has developed a classroom-based assessment process for K-3 students called the Early Literacy Profile intended to be an instructional assessment.

According to a recent study in Educational Assessment, a formative assessment system for New York K-3 students was intended to set itself apart from traditional testing:

• by examining students' literacy skills in the context of everyday classroom activities;
• by reporting student performance over time rather than in a one-time  snapshot;
•  by referencing itself to standards and stages of development; and
•  by providing information useful for reporting without the high stakes  attached to most tests.

A new special report from Educational Research Newsletter, Assessment for Learning: 12 recent studies on formative assessment and aligning assessments with learning goals, includes more information about New York's formative assessment process as well as strategies used by schools in Wisconsin, Texas, the UK and Canada to advance learning goals with assessments.

The 12 studies featured in this special report provide a range of perspectives from the latest educational research on how learning and assessment work together. This set of studies is intended to give educators a sense of current thinking on the interplay between learning and assessing.